I was listening to Geraldo this morning on F&F as he articulated his liberal logic on guns and gun control. Essentially his position is: “I’ve got the guns I want, so you shouldn’t want anything more,” which is a variation of the basic liberal argument for regulating everything which is “I’ve got mine, so now I can regulate yours.”

Butt what really caught my ear was this comment from Geraldo, and I quote: “How could you not trust your own government?”

I think this was intended to be rhetorical, so I won’t mention all the things that the government has banned in the past to protect us from perceived harm that turned out to be perfectly harmless (e.g., cyclamates, saccharine, red dye #2, DDT - really! ).

Let’s get directly at the heart of the beast: the Second Amendment. The fact that the Second Amendment is not about hunting (that was pretty much a given back in Revolutionary America, if you wanted to eat) seems lost on today’s intellectual glitterati. Indeed, despite the intelligentsia’s inability to imagine a government that we the people might need to be protected from, that is precisely what the Founders had in mind with this amendment; an armed citizenry to protect themselves from future tyrannical leaders like the one they had just fought to free themselves from.

The purpose of the Second Amendment is to secure our ability to oppose enemies foreign and domestic, a guarantee against disorder and tyranny. Consider the words of Supreme Court justice Joseph Story — who was, it bears noting, appointed to the Court by the guy who wrote the Constitution:

The importance of this article will scarcely be doubted by any persons, who have duly reflected upon the subject. The militia is the natural defence of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace, both from the enormous expenses, with which they are attended, and the facile means, which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to subvert the government, or trample upon the rights of the people. The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.

“Usurpation and arbitrary power of the rulers” — not Bambi, not burglars. While your granddad’s .30-06 is a good deal more powerful than the .223 rifles that give blue-state types the howling fantods, that is not what we have a constitutional provision to protect. Liberals are forever asking: “Why would anybody need a gun like that?” And the answer is: because we are not serfs. We are a free people living under a republic of our own construction. We may consent to be governed, but we will not be ruled. (h/tDoug Ross)

Of course, that kind of thinking is so out of date, so three centuries ago. I mean, it’s not like governments ever go awry in our enlightened modern world:

“There was no such thing as the holocaust, there was no no such thing as the holocaust, there was no no such thing as the holocaust…”

Communism has killed 100 million people: what do you say we give it another chance?

I, along with all of you, wish Breitbart was still with us, as he would have had a unique way to address this thorny issue of Big Government intrusion into our constitutional rights. Although nobody will ever fill his shoes, I feel confident I know what his position would be in this regard: